Just finished #IbrahimAbdel's 'No one sleeps in Alexandria'. It has some really bravura episodes. There is an odd (and irritating) magical realist current that doesn't really go anywhere. The protagonist is wonderfully passive which gives the book its beautifully disjointed tone. Major world events, largely the second world war, are juxtaposed with the mundane and the trivial, because to the inhabitants of Alexandria it really it is a war for someone else's empire. It captures something profound about the little person's importance and importance. It is also on the side of love and friendship.
Not quite sure what to make of it, but I enjoyed it very much.
“Out-of-town” family members who were visiting a residence
Okay, why were they staying there?
The family members are related to someone who currently lives in the home and are not related to the woman found in the freezer,
So, let’s say you gave a guy name Alan who lives in the home. Alan lived in the home, and invited his family members Brad and Janet to stay. Brad and Janet investigate the freezer, and see a dead body of someone (apparently Mary Margaret Haxby-Jones, 81, a white woman) they have never seen or heard of, then call the police. But Alan does not? I’m trying to think of this setup, and the oddly worded distinctions in this article. I guess we’re all trying to figure out if “Alan” killed poor Mary, then put her in the freezer, but why not say that? And why specify Mary is a white woman?
It’s all weird. And maybe I am projecting, but I am trying to picture myself as Brad and/or Janet. “So, we were snooping in your deep freezer, and, uh… who is that?” Why were they snooping in the deep freezer? Was it a deep freezer or an upright? Was the body intact? Even wrapped? What did “Alan” say? Why did Brad and Janet call the police and not Alan? Why is Alan never mentioned, even anonymously? “The legal counsel for Alan has stated he didn’t know the body was in the freezer, the freezer belonged to his father, now deceased.” Or something?
These days I’m most interested in Endeavour and Garuda, mostly as gateways into the Arch world without the headaches. Endeavour seems more mature so that’ll be my next install.
I’m giving up on Manjaro since it seems to lag and have odd discrepancies with Arch/AUR.
Going further back I liked Mint and SuSE and even Ubuntu, but the lack of gaming focus has driven me to other distros.
Okay let's talk about what Ladapo is pointing to. It's this preprint from October of 2023 from the Center for Open Science (COS). Now preface, COS is an open place and there's quality there, but it's open, so there's also bullshit. So approaching anything within COS should be taken with massive grains of salt. Additionally, you should take what I have to say as such too. In fairness, I'm relaying information from a person I know who works on infectious diseases.
Alright let's move on. What's this preprint saying? Here is a breakdown, remember this is just a breakdown glossing over the finer points here.
Making the mRNA requires scientists starting with circular pieces of DNA called plasmids. The plasmids contain the genetic code for the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. (slight aside here) The spike protein is how the virus enters your cells so that it can be copied, producing more virus that then subsequently infect even more cells. The idea of a vaccine is to have an antibody already within you that can attach itself to the spike. When an antibody is attached to the spike, the spike cannot attach to one of your cells, because the anitbody is quite literally in the way.
(okay back to the main part) The plasmids are reproduced billion fold via bacteria. A chemical is added to the bacteria that makes them release the plasmids they've created. An enzyme causes our target spike DNA to be cut out of the plasmid and then another enzyme causes that DNA to be made into mRNA. A final series of enzymes then takes the DNA and slices it into nonsense, think paper shredder for DNA. The mRNA is extracted and that's added to a nanostructured lipid carrier (NLC).
(okay another aside) NLCs are made up of a few parts:
A lot of solid lipid nanoparticles. Think of it as really, really tiny blocks of lard. That fill the inside of the surfactant.
The actual mRNA also inside.
A liquid lipid basically a watery like oil that fills the rest.
There's other parts to keep it fresh and what not, but that's the main points. All of these are easily broken down by your body since they're all basically fat, oil, or somewhere in between those two (lard-ish like). The way they deliver their mRNA to your cell is by getting close to your cell's wall and kind of "bubble popping" because the surfactant is made to do that when it's touched by things like your cell wall. Sort of how a soapy hand doesn't pop a bubble but a dry one will. It's a bit more complex, but that's roughly how it works-ish.
(back to what I was saying) So we have the NLCs loaded up, but obviously during this whole process, some DNA fragments from the DNA shredder gets into the final product. This plasmid DNA is what Ladapo and the preprint are talking about.
Okay so we now know where the DNA they speak about is coming from. Does it actually pose a problem? No.
One, the DNA isn't loaded up into the NLCs, so the odds that it'll make it to a cell wall in the first place is really low. Remember the inside of your body is a torrent of flow, if your payload isn't in a ship (NLC) it'll get carried away by the flow. The DNA is likely to run into all kinds of random things inside your body, slowly damaging it until a random white blood cell sees it and says "this doesn't belong here" and then nom-nom.
Two, your cells have walls. And neat thing, it was a whole todo that lead us to the technology to convince a cell to take in a random lipid we gave it. TL;DR - It was really fucking complicated!! Cells don't like random shit getting inside them. Go figure.
Three, yes there is an even smaller chance that a fragment might actually cross the cell wall. Once inside there's a whole dizzying city in there with all kinds of organelles doing shit. Odds are any one of those things is going to catch the fragment just floating around in there. And when caught is sent to the recycler.
Four, your actual cell's DNA is inside the nucleus. Which has it's own complex wall and security system. The odds that any one fragment makes it pass that barrier are unfathomably impossible. But even still.
Five, if it gets pass that. It can't get integrated into your DNA. That requires a sequence of specific enzymes to signal to the cell to begin that process. Which random DNA fragment floating around wouldn't trigger. The odds that, that function is on-going AND a fragment has made the long journey bypassing literally every security system in your body. Even with the preprint's 5,100 ng/dose contamination, you have better odds of finding a specific grain of sand on this planet (1 in 7.5 sextillion), than that happening.
I saw this post and wanted to ask the opposite. What are some items that really aren’t worth paying the expensive version for? Preferably more extreme or unexpected examples.
Yeah it's why I qualified it with the "too good to be true" prices and names you don't recognise. The odds are far greater that a brand name you've never heard of undercutting at more than half the price of a brand you do recognise is very likely cutting corners somewhere and stamping invalid certifications. With electronics that can end pretty badly.
Not writing off all Chinese companies. Just the ones that have a new name every month and are selling at too good to be true prices. I think they're suffering the same as Japanese electronics did in the 80s. There were enough bad examples to make people assume it was the same for all (you'll see it in movies of the era, with people referring to "jap-crap"). But as we know, some very big companies today rose from that situation to be extremely trusted today. I suspect over time the same will be true in China.
When Charla Plaines saw the toll lead paint took on her granddaughter, she was able to get the hazardous substance scrubbed from her home thanks to a federally funded program that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives want to cut....
In my hometown (rural Midwest), there’s a Walmart, a Schnucks (Midwest chain), maybe an IGA if it’s still around, and about five Dollar Generals (more convenience store than grocery). I don’t think I’ve seen a farmers market there my whole life, despite being literally in the middle of a million farms. Super odd now that I think about it.
That’s definitely odd. Nothing in there jumps out to me as problematic. Have you had any issues with any other games? The consensus is generally that most/all the major bugs have been squashed. It might be a sign that something underlying is causing difficulties. My guess would be your graphics drivers, or GFX card memory corruption issues. Do the problems get better or worse as you play? If they get worse, it might be a thermal related problem.
I have noticed the game can be a bit brittle on issues. The few I had required a full restart of the game to fix. Reloading saves etc didn’t seem to help.
I can definitely see how you would dislike it, if it’s being buggy. It’s one of those games where it would easily break the immersion that makes it work.
Holy shit, I realize this is in NotTheOnion, but I’ll be damned if this whole thing doesn’t read like satire. Reading about former jihadists now being stuck in traffic, bored at work, and not being able to afford rent is oddly hilarious.
I wish that was true in my city. I love driving the manual shift car but it certainly hasn’t saved us anything on car insurance. The idea of a car thief who can’t drive stick shift is so funny, needs a movie. The only benefits beyond fun and not worrying about an automatic transmission failing is some odd respect from valet guys and mechanics and old men.
You can literally hire hookers, fuck them, then beat them to death and take your money back. But showing some skin is the issue? What an odd society we have.
Kevin Hines regretted jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge the moment his hands released the rail and he plunged the equivalent of 25 stories into the Pacific Ocean, breaking his back....
I never did have to pay out the 100:1 odds (or whatever I was offering) to anyone from day 1 of the previous announcement…
I have no more faith in this one, so I’ll go 100 to 1 odds again, that this will not result in room temperature super conductors. Anyone want to take me up on this?
If it turns out I’m wrong I promise I’m good for it (if room temperature super conductivity is a thing I’ll happily give away all of my life’s savings, as money will quickly become meaningless), who wants to give me their money?
And within a decade of that day, if it comes from easily fabricated materials, money will mean nothing, and I don’t care to fight with the crazies who will try to be hoarding it. A few thousand, or hundreds of thousands, would probably be easy to acquire, millions feels like too much work, even if it is worthless. I’m thinking about my future (dream) spare time (also a dream), and I don’t want to commit future me to coming up with those amounts. I’m sure future me will have a few hundred for anyone if anyone ever took me up on my offer.
So my offer stands at 100:1, because I’m serious about paying out on it when it happens, when else do you get genuine offers at those odds? Give me your dollars.
It’s just odd that people get such big hate boners from ignorance. Everything I’m reading about this is telling me that 23andMe should have enabled forced MFA before this happened rather than after, which I agree with, but that doesn’t mean this result is entirely their fault either. People need to take some personal responsibility sometimes with their own personal info.
I’ve always found it odd that Ethiopia doesn’t have any coast, they’re a historic power and the coast is right there, you’d think they would have just taken a bit. Djibouti couldn’t have been that hard to conquer. Or just a little piece of Somalia or Eritrea.
Are there games that you tried but just couldn’t get into because they feel outdated? Games that, in theory, you would enjoy, but don’t because the controls, graphics, writing, or mechanics just don’t feel good anymore. Games that, compared to today, just don’t hold up to your standards....
I don’t think it actually matters for the Witcher series. They don’t tend to dwell too much on the events of the previous game.
I assumed that Yen was something from the Witcher 2 (that I skipped), but I don’t think she’s in that at all. If anything it relies more on the books for the backstory of each game.
Witcher 1 is a very odd game, gameplay-wise, that makes more sense when you realise it was initially some top down D&D game. It’s just presented as a regular 3rd person game that we now expect to play somewhat differently, rather than the odd “click the mouse at the right moment” system they went with. It’s worth it just for the story. Just turn down the difficulty as it’s really not worth struggling with, although for me the hardest boss in the game was a dog near the start.
PS1/PS2 MGS games are very odd when you first play them. If you get used to how the control and the very odd amounts of “realism”, then they can turn out to be lots of fun.
Why would you write nonsense like this when you obviously know nothing at all about Iran or regional dynamics? Iraq is a close ally of Iran, so no, they’re not “not far away from the top” of Iran’s regional opponents. Also, those who don’t like the general’s ‘clan’? WTF are you babbling about? Iran is not a clan-based society the way you seem to believe it is. I’m Iranian and the ‘clan’ of Soleimani is not a subject I’ve heard discussed ever. You seem to think the garbage spread by the Bushie’s in the 2000’s about the region is how things actually work. It’s a pathetically uninformed attempt at sounding smart. Read a book maybe?
There are three candidates for these attacks. Odds all clearly point towards the Israelis as the top suspects. However, it could also have been carried out by the MEK, or the Islamic State Khorasan. But even if it did, the likelihood is high that Mossad played a coordinating role in the operation. There’s zero chance Soleimani’s ‘clan’, whatever the fuck that refers to, was a factor in this terrorist attack.
You do you. But I would like to point out that prime encourages excessive consumption of crap we all don’t need. Maybe this bullshit will let you consider dumping prime altogether and perhaps you will find that it isn’t missed.
Personally I do buy stuff from amazon on occasion. Like windshield wipers of odd sizes. But the lack of two day shipping is a good moderator to help me curb my american programmed buy-fucking-everything-to-fill-that-hole-inside mentality.
Yes, and odds are they are asking as a way to bring up the idea of how many animals are killed in order to harvest plant crops. If you had bothered to go to the link, it would have at least somewhat answered your question because the short version is: fundamentally, significantly less than the amount of animals killed to produce meat.
All it takes is to think it through. If harvesting crops kills a lot of animals (which as the link shows, is already significantly less than some assholes made it up to be), then raising animals for food automatically kills even more animals because it takes way more crops to feed the animals that are raised for meat or dairy, than it takes to just feed humans directly.
Body found in San Diego home's freezer may be woman missing for 9 years, police say (www.nbcnews.com)
“Out-of-town” family members discovered the body in the freezer last month....
Linux Distros Evolution - January 2024 Update: Pop!_OS in Decline? (boilingsteam.com)
An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros and their adoption by users over time.
This is odd: Why has all Oasis music disappeared from streaming music services in Canada? | Alan Cross (www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com)
Buy music as much as you can
‘Scientific nonsense’: experts dismiss Florida official’s Covid vaccine remarks (www.theguardian.com)
State’s politically appointed surgeon general claims vaccines can contaminate human DNA but experts say comment has no merit...
What are some items that really aren't worth paying the expensive version for?
I saw this post and wanted to ask the opposite. What are some items that really aren’t worth paying the expensive version for? Preferably more extreme or unexpected examples.
Black Americans would feel the sting of Republican budget cut proposals (www.reuters.com)
When Charla Plaines saw the toll lead paint took on her granddaughter, she was able to get the hazardous substance scrubbed from her home thanks to a federally funded program that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives want to cut....
What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?
They keep raising prices, stating that it’s due to inflation, but then they keep having record profits....
Researchers Say There’s a 5% Chance That AI Will Cause Human Extinction (gizmodo.com)
Cyberpunk 2077 DLC Phantom Liberty: Over 5 million copies sold (nitter.net)
Taliban Militants Fed Up With Office Culture, Ready to Quiet Quit (time.com)
Stop, minions of darkness! (i.redd.it)
Tesla is banned from driving schools because of new turn signals (electrek.co)
Xbox Player Gets Banned for 1 Year After Recording Baldur's Gate 3 Scenes (gamerant.com)
An Xbox player was given a year-long ban for recording nude scenes in Baldur’s Gate 3....
It took decades, but San Francisco finally installs nets to stop suicides off Golden Gate Bridge (apnews.com)
Kevin Hines regretted jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge the moment his hands released the rail and he plunged the equivalent of 25 stories into the Pacific Ocean, breaking his back....
Possible Meissner effect near room temperature in copper-substituted lead apatite (arxiv.org)
23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
Hope this isn’t a repeated submission. Funny how they’re trying to deflect blame after they tried to change the EULA post breach.
Landlocked Ethiopia gets access to Red Sea after deal with ‘unrecognised’ country (www.telegraph.co.uk)
What games can you not get into because they feel too outdated?
Are there games that you tried but just couldn’t get into because they feel outdated? Games that, in theory, you would enjoy, but don’t because the controls, graphics, writing, or mechanics just don’t feel good anymore. Games that, compared to today, just don’t hold up to your standards....
Almost 100 dead in blasts at Iran memorial for assassinated commander (www.theguardian.com)
Two explosions at Kerman ceremony marking anniversary of killing of Qassem Suleimani raise Middle East tensions further...
I have to pay extra to remove ads from Prime Video (lemdro.id)
I’d seen rumours online but got the email this morning....
This (lemmy.today)